“Man, I’m just so happy and so excited. I finally won a NASCAR race,” Dillon, younger brother of Austin Dillon, said. “It’s been my whole life, and to finally do it means so much. Man, it’s awesome.”

Also reveling in the victory was Dillon’s owner/grandfather, Richard Childress.

“I couldn’t be more prouder than what he accomplished tonight,” Childress said. “To watch him race, and watch how he kept searching for the groove and moving around … he looked like he was a pro out there.”

Busch, Buescher and Dillon swapped the lead between them eight times in a 25-lap stretch before Busch began to pull away. After a cycle of green-flag stops that started with Dillon’s trip down pit road on lap 82, Busch held a five-second lead, but a caution for debris on the backstretch on Lap 105 slowed the race and bunched the field.

Lead-lap cars came to pit road on Lap 106, eliminating the need for fuel conservation the rest of the way. After a restart on Lap 110, Busch pulled away to a one-second lead as Dillon and Buescher battled for second behind him.

But Busch slammed into the wall on the final run and damaged his truck, allowing Dillon to overtake him for the lead on Lap 125 of 130.

“They were just a better truck; they had a lot better handle on the bottom of the race track than we did, especially throughout the longer runs,” Busch said. “Then when it’s time to race, a guy catches you and you’ve got to go up to the top, and you try to push and you get sideways and get into the fence. There’s no room to catch it up there. It was all I could do to try to push as hard as I could; I didn’t have anything to hold onto.”

Bad luck continued to haunt four-time champion Ron Hornaday Jr., still seeking his first victory since joining Joe Denette Motorsports at the end of the season. On Lap 37, contact from the truck of Tim George Jr. trapped Hornaday against the outside wall in a wreck that also collected Jason White’s Ford.